Chef Tim Says...

Dr. Tim Says....

Three Meals a Day

Last week I discussed the structure of dinner and what a good healthy
and balanced evening meal should look like. I have felt for a long time
that eating sensible regular meals and snacks is the key to being healthy
and maintaining a healthy weight. In listening to my overweight and obese
patients I often hear them say, “Well, I don’t eat during the day. I only
eat dinner.” Sometimes they will talk about eating late in the day.

While this is only anecdote, hearing it over and over has made me think
that there’s something to this. Yet there’s not a lot of definitive research
to prove that skipping meals during the day and eating only dinner contributes
to weight gain. We do have some indirect information from studies showing
that eating breakfast makes a difference in maintaining a healthy weight.
There’s less info about lunch, however. We do have a lot of research on
snacking. Everything from time of snacks, type of snack, how much is consumed
and on and on.

There’s also a lot of research on the volume of food and calorie density
that helps us to understand how satisfying various meals and snacks are
throughout the day. There’s a great addition to our knowledge with a group
of researchers in Sweden reporting on whether meal patterns might have
an effect on obesity.

They looked at just over 3,600 men and women with about 15% of them
being obese (BMI >30). Interestingly, the number of calories consumed
each day was similar between the obese and non-obese participants. The
obese subjects were less likely to consume alcohol and had a higher percentage
of their calories from sugar. They also ate more protein and less fiber
than those of normal weight.

The big difference was that the obese folks skipped breakfast and lunch.
This has been observed before in smaller studies - often enough to have
acquired the name “night eating syndrome.” This study also showed that
obese folks reported eating larger meals, with increased portion sizes
across the board. This does make some sense given that they ate fewer
meals but the same number of calories.

What to make of this research? I believe that this is a big step forward
in knowing whether meal patterns make a difference in weight control.
It certainly appears that it does make a difference.

We are now coming to understand how best to help people best eat healthy,
lose weight and maintain a healthy weight. Information such as this along
with the work of so many great researchers on everything from Mediterranean
diet to calorie density to snacking that help us understand exactly what
works best.